Background
Joel Tanner Hart was born on February 10, 1810, near Winchester, Kentucky, United States, the son of Josiah and Judith (Tanner) Hart.
Joel Tanner Hart was born on February 10, 1810, near Winchester, Kentucky, United States, the son of Josiah and Judith (Tanner) Hart.
His parents had character, position, and education, but owing to family reverses, young Joel received only three months’ schooling. Studious by nature and helped by his brothers, he learned what he could from books read by the evening firelight.
Lacking work near his home, Joel Hart went to Bourbon County, where he built stone walls and chimneys; on one of the latter he carved his name. At twenty-one, while working in a marble-yard at Lexington, he met the sculptor Shobal Vail Clevenger, who was modeling a bust of Henry Clay. This meeting inspired Hart to attempt a bust of Cassius Marcellus Clay. The result being happy, he sought Andrew Jackson at the Hermitage, obtained from him sittings for a marble bust, and produced a good likeness. Returning to Lexington, he made busts of John J. Crittenden, Robert Wickliffe, and the Rev. Alexander Campbell; thereafter, his local fame was secure.
Hart then visited Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Richmond, and New York, studying the statuary in these cities, and getting, as he wrote to his brother, “attention enough for a lifetime. ” In Richmond, in 1846, he received from the “Ladies’ Clay Association” an order for a life-size marble statue of Henry Clay, at $5, 000. He had his subject daguerreotyped from many views, made casts of the face and other parts of the body, took measurements, and had sittings. His procedure was characteristic: a reliance on mechanical means, a leisurely, groping study from life. The work still exists - a poor thing enough, except for the fine head. After three years, the plaster model was ready for shipment to Italy, there to be copied in marble.
Hart went abroad, visiting Rome and Florence and choosing Florence as his headquarters (1849), and while awaiting his plaster model, spent fourteen months in London, giving much time to the study of anatomy. He visited Paris, and viewed the old masters at the Louvre. When at last he returned to Florence, he learned that his long-expected model had been lost by shipwreck in the Bay of Biscay. He therefore sent for a duplicate, which arrived a year later.
Advertised in London, it brought Hart orders for ten marble busts of Londoners at 100 guineas each. These orders, with others, including that for the bust of Ex-President Fillmore, supported him while he waited final payment for his statue of Clay. Although it is signed “J. T. Hart, 1847, ” it was not until 1859 that the Clay statue was complete and in place. In that year Hart came to the United States for its unveiling and stayed eight months, lauded and feted. He had planned to open a studio in New York, but on receiving from Louisville a commission for a duplicate of his statue, at $10, 000, followed by another from New Orleans, he went instead to Florence to execute these works.
The three statues set him on his feet, financially. Hart had time to reveal in marble his long-cherished vision of “Woman Triumphant, ” originally called “The Triumph of Chastity, ” a life-size nude female figure holding an arrow high above the reach of an imploring Cupid. For thirty leisurely years he kept this group by him in Florence, seeking its perfection by a study of more than a hundred and fifty models. It received extraordinary plaudits; at one time he refused $20, 000 for it, and after his death, ladies of Lexington, Kentucky bought a marble replica which was set up in the courthouse, but was later destroyed. Another ideal works by Hart were “Angelina, ” "Penseroso, ” and a “Child with Flowers. ” He died and was buried in Florence. In January 1885, special enactment, his body was brought home and reinterred with imposing ceremonies at Frankfort, Kentucky.
Hart was tall, vigorous, bearded; in appearance, a pioneer; in reality, a dreamer. Gentle and blameless, he had a host of admiring friends of both sexes, but he remained a bachelor.
Hart never married.